For a long time scrawl has been the main driving force behind OpenMW. So when the news came that he’d be going on a hiatus to improve his health, many of us thought that the progress would halt, and that the next releases of OpenMW would only include bug-fixes, if anything…

But we were so utterly wrong! Out of the woodworks appeared Allofich and MiroslavR. The duo has not only solved many bugs but also implemented several new features. In addition, scrawl is still active in the community – accepting pull requests, reading the forums and occasionally closing an issue when his health allows it. While the pace is a bit slower now, our project still makes progress, and OpenMW steadily continues its journey towards version 1.0.

On the OpenMW-CS side of things there have also been several improvements. Previously, the scene window was a static view of the world where you couldn’t really do anything besides looking around with the camera. Aeslywinn came in, reworked the camera system, implemented pathgrids, water rendering and object movement, rotation and scaling sub modes. While he has now left the OpenMW project to do other great things, he has also left our editor with the capability to create new worlds.

It should be noted that, although what you see in the above screenshot was made using OpenMW-CS, there are still some features that need to implemented for the editor. Remember – If you have skills in C++ or QT and are interested in contributing to the OpenMW project, then you too can be an OpenMW hero.

If you’ve never heard of this before, that might be due to the curious fact that this is used only once in the entire game of Morrowind – with Trueflame, the legendary sword of Nerevar Indoril.

As you can see, having the sword equipped lights up a small area around the player. The blade itself isn’t the actual source of light. It has a script attatched that adds an invisible light item into the player’s inventory, which then makes the player glow.

This got me thinking. In many games a radius of light surrounds the player. If one were to make a mod or an entirely new game, they could use the abovementioned mechanic for exactly that purpose. So I did. But what I saw was not what I expected…

I found a bug. Seemingly anything that uses a normal map gets lit up to full brightness, achieving an albino look. The bug report is filed here and will hopefully get a fix some time in the future.

3 hours later Scrawl has already fixed it! I retry my experiment and go for a small pink aura for my invisible character.

Tools

OpenMW is an attempt to reimplement the popular role playing game Morrowind. It aims to be a fully playable, open source implementation of the game. You must own Morrowind to use OpenMW. You can watch short video-faq or read detailed information on our FAQ page. OpenMW is an attempt to remake the Morrowind - brilliant role playing game. We're trying to remade Morrowind using open source tools and libraries. You won't need any Morrowind patches, because OpenMW will fix most common Morrowind engine bugs. It's worth to mention that OpenMW is open source Morrowind engine remake which allow much greater modability: change game rules, create new spell effects, etc. through scripting. With OpenMW you will be able to run Morrowind overhaul mods, texture replacers and much more like with original engine.